Stirring the Waters: Investigating why many in Appalachia lack reliable, clean water

Stirring the Waters: Why so many lack access to clean water in Central Appalachia

The United Nations recognizes access to clean water as a human right. Three reporters in Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern West Virginia explore whether people who live there have that right.

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The United Nations recognizes access to clean water as a human right. Three reporters in Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern West Virginia explore whether people who live there have that right.

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For many families in Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia, the absence of clean, reliable drinking water has become part of daily life.

They buy bottled water rather than drink what comes out of their taps. They collect rainwater in buckets, fearing there won’t be any running water at all the next day. They drive to natural springs on the sides of highways and backroads to fill up jugs for cooking and making coffee.

Based on nearly six months of reporting and dozens of interviews with residents, water district officials and experts, this series explores an ongoing crisis in Central Appalachia that has left many families with poor access to clean, reliable drinking water. The reporting project, titled “Stirring the Waters,” aims to bring attention to their plight, and to show that without action, access to affordable, clean drinking water in the region may well worsen before it improves.

And in the end, the project hopes to stir a public debate on the scope of the problem and what is required of government and community leaders to find solutions to the crisis.

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▪ Water districts in Central Appalachia struggle to perform routine maintenance, such as repairing leaking service lines, which leads to quality and reliability problems for customers. Many districts are understaffed and underfunded, leaving them to perform inadequate repairs that fail to address the long term problems of water loss and crumbling service lines.

▪ Some grant funding awarded to districts cannot be used to address districts’ most pressing issues. In Kentucky, the Abandoned Mine Lands program has awarded millions to a water district to extend service lines to a federal prison, rather than repairing the myriad of infrastructure problems that disrupt service and quality for customers.

▪ Some districts repeatedly violate the Safe Water Drinking Act by producing water that exceeds levels of certain chemical compounds that could pose a health risk to some customers, particularly infants, pregnant women and the elderly.

▪ Grant funding is the most sought after funding source for water projects, but experts in West Virginia say those pools of money are shrinking, and they have been for decades. Today, low-interest loans are being utilized more and more, but even when they are low-interest, the debt can handicap small water systems, some believe due to the way the West Virginia Public Service Commission regulates rate increases for those in the state.

▪ The only real source of revenue for community water systems is by collecting bills from customers. As more and more people leave West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky — in the last 10 years, West Virginia is one of two states that have lost population nationally — water systems will have less and less revenue. Of 44 water systems in Southern West Virginia, only 13 had an increase in customers in 2017 compared to 2007.

▪ Rather than raising rates gradually, local politicians often pressure water boards to keep rates unchanged, leading to financial catastrophe in some cases. Some water districts in Kentucky have refused to raise rates even when pressured by the state Public Service Commission.

▪ In Southern West Virginia, nine community water systems have been under boil water advisories for longer than five years. While the state is aware of these struggling systems, there are no records that indicate anything extra is being done to assist them. All but one of those systems have been serious violators with the EPA for the last 12 quarters. According to records at the EPA, state inspections at these systems are still few and far between.

▪ The Infrastructure and Jobs Development Council, a West Virginia agency that acts as a clearinghouse for all infrastructure projects in the state, estimates that $17 billion is needed to correct water and sewage infrastructure and connect the entire population to central systems. That’s three times more than the state’s entire budget in 2018, and those costs are going to grow as more maintenance is needed.

This series is part of a collaborative effort by the Lexington Herald-Leader, Charleston Gazette-Mail and West Virginia Public Broadcasting that was coordinated by The GroundTruth Project and its new initiative, Report for America, a national service program made possible in rural Appalachia with support from the Galloway Family Foundation.

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Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Will Wright spent months digging through documents and interviewing residents of Eastern Kentucky as he reported "Stirring the Waters" alongside colleagues from the Charleston Gazette-Mail and West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

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More from the series

Stirring the Waters

The lack of clean, reliable drinking water in Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia is stirring a public debate over the crisis and prompting calls to fix a long-failing infrastructure.

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